Tag Archives: cider

My series of reviews of cider making books wouldn’t be complete without covering the book you are most likely to find in your local homebrewing and wine making shop: Cider: making, using & enjoying sweet & hard cider by Annie Proulx1 and Lew Nichols. Last summer I read the 2nd edition, and this winter I [...]

Making Craft Cider: A Ciderist’s Guide by Simon McKie is an excellent starting point when learning to make your own cider. This is a short and well-written book that does a good job of summarising the best of the other four books in this series of reviews. McKie covers all the important topics—including choosing apples, [...]

Real Cidermaking on a Small Scale by Michael Pooley and John Lomax is a good introductory book on cider making. It is short with lots of photographs. One feature I like that is not in the other cider books is a pair of flowcharts on the steps for making either naturally conditioned sparkling cider or [...]

Andrew Lea’s Craft Cider Making is the best book I have read on producing your own cider from fresh apple juice. It is an excellent introduction to making traditional ciders. As a food biochemist who spent 13 years in cider related research, the author is probably the most qualified author in this series. This background [...]

The first book I read on cider was Ben Watson’s Cider, hard and sweet. This book is an excellent starting point for Americans only familiar with the pasteurised and preserved “cider” found in grocery stores in the fall. It provides a good introduction to the styles of cider produced around the world and includes the [...]

Two years ago, I became interested in the classic American drink: cider. This interest was partially due to Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, and later Daniel Okrent’s Last Call. I happen to live in Fort Wayne, the final resting place of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) the great lower-Midwestern spreader of cider apples and the [...]